I opened my eyes and winked at her. “Works for me.”
She rolled her eyes. “The patterns are solidifying. Whoever did this left a trail of Easter eggs, we think leading to a back door.”
“Remind me to thank him personally.” I was eager to have a look at today’s agenda.
We arrived in the cafeteria, if one could call it that, in the center of Sera Jey. I grabbed a cup of tea and sat down with Hotstuff at a wooden table in the corner. A list of activities floated into view over the bench.
“Not so bad for today, mister, not as bad as yesterday.”
By now, we’d built up an espionage, and counterespionage, network that outstripped any but the wealthiest of corporations and nation-states, all with the specific directive of bending the future timeline to my will to keep me alive. We funneled all the money we could from Phuture News and had sold off all my assets to fund the program.
One particular item floated up through the threat matrices.
“So there’s no way around it?” In the long list of things I’d had to do, this one hit closest to home. I was struggling with it.
“Sorry, boss. You’d better take care of it before the morning meditation.”
I felt terrible about sabotaging the launch of the Infinixx distributed consciousness project, but there wasn’t any way around it. A Triad gangster network in Hong Kong would have used it to pinpoint some of my other activities, and disabling the launch was a key vector in keeping my lifeline intact.
I shrugged. Progress is progress. I’d better stick with the program. Using a communication phantom, I punched up Patricia’s networks, requesting an urgent, private meeting with her primary subjective.
A large Chenrezig statue, the Buddha of Compassion, sat at the head of the long chamber I was in. Its dozens of arms stretched out around it like star fire, its many faces gazing down at me benevolently. Its array of outstretched arms seemed eerily like phantom pssi limbs made visible in real-space. Unnerved, I turned my gaze to the window and the majestic peaks around us.
The plains surrounding Lhasa were filled with permanent, makeshift encampments of international troops that stood as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian bases lining the opposite sides of the valley. The Americans were there as part of the UN mission, as were NATO forces, but the largest contingent was the African Union.
Many thought hope for the future could be found in Africa—where the engine of a new economic powerhouse was already growling, and the last place left on Earth that still had a growing population. Lagos, the capital of the African Union, was closely linked with Terra Nova, the offshore colony in the South Atlantic. Terra Nova had their own synthetic reality product that was set to compete with pssi.
“You want me to what?” asked Patricia, materializing in the seat across from me.
I pulled my gaze back from looking out the window. A glittering security blanket settled around us with her arrival. Patricia paused for a moment while the blanket sealed.
“Do you have everything you need? What’s this about?”
She’d helped me smuggle the smarticles out of Atopia, even helped me create my covert communications network, and all without even asking what it was for. Thank God for old friends.
“I’m fine,” I replied quietly. “I don’t need any more materials, but I do need you to come help me, right now, in your physical form.” This sounded odd even before it came out, especially coming from the slight frame of my monk, diminutive in front of this world-famous scientist. “I can’t say more, except that it’s critical and needs to be kept secret.”
Patricia eyed me. “You realize the launch of Infinixx is less than an hour away?”
“I’m not saying you can’t go. Go virtually. Isn’t that what your whole project is about? What’s the difference?”
This was weird, but I’d gotten over my squeamishness about these sorts of requests.
She hesitated.
“You said I could rely on you if I ever needed anything, right?”
“Yes, I suppose.… ”
“So I’m asking.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
“Perfect,” I replied, sensing this mission accomplished. “I appreciate it, Pat.”
An awkward silence descended.
“So what’s going on with these storm systems?” I asked casually, changing the topic. I was curious to see if Patricia had anything more to say than what I got through the mediaworlds. I’d been so caught up in my own disasters that I’d hardly paid attention to the storm systems that were threatening Atopia. With a little more breathing space, I’d started to let my mind assimilate more of what was happening on the outside.
These storms were the big news.
“We don’t know,” she replied, shrugging, “but they’re definitely not natural.”
Not natural? I hadn’t heard that before.
“Something is going on, and we’re not sure what.”
No kidding, I thought to myself.
11
Finally, after longer than I could remember, I was really enjoying my walk through Buen Retiro Park in Madrid. Summer was turning fully towards fall, and the leaves were starting to come off the trees, creating a beautiful golden carpet underfoot. A perfectly faultless blue sky hung overhead.
In my mind’s eye, I saw myself stepping gracefully to the side as a helicopter crashed down from the heavens, nearly crushing me on a walk through Stanley Park in Vancouver the next day. In another splinter, I watched a car swerve, bouncing into my beach buggy as I turned into a parking lot in Malibu a few days later. The car clipped the surfboard I’d tied to the back of the beach buggy, sending it spinning around. I ducked just before the board would have knocked my head off.
It was all effortless action, like a ballet with death.
We’d found a solution to my problem. Since we’d stabilized them a few weeks back when I was in Tibet, the density of death events had quickly fallen. There were still nearly twenty thousand future fatalities we had to avoid to maintain my healthy timeline, but what had been terrifying a few weeks ago was now just a walk in the park.
Literally.
I strode purposefully as I walked around Retiro Park, on each step picking out another yellow leaf underfoot to grind into the gravel, imagining them to be tiny harbingers of doom I was snuffing out. Looking up from my work, I found myself standing in front of the Crystal Palace.
Down the path a little way, a woman leaned over to pick up one of the leaves and began laughing then crying, completely oblivious to everyone around her. Not wanting to disturb her, I shifted my walk onto another trail. I glanced back over my shoulder, but she was already gone.
She’d looked awfully familiar.
To protect myself, I’d developed a kind of temporal immune system, stretching out into the alternate universes connected to me. An army of killer-tomorrow-bots spun through the probabilistic spaces surrounding me, neutralizing threats, clotting dangerous portals and pathways both into the future and through the past. This immune system had become a part of me, a part of my living body, a highly attuned death sense that allowed me to thread my way through even the most dangerous of situations.
For once, the conspiracy theorists were right. Some of the tabloid worlds had begun publishing stories about a shadowy force that had been detected, pushing and pulling the future prediction networks. The shadowy force they were referring to was me, but there was something else out there too—the thing that was trying to hunt me down. But now I was hunting it as well.
The hurricanes threatening to destroy Atopia had more of my attention. In my situation, it was impossible to ignore the possibility that the storms were aimed at me, a final attempt to destroy my power base after attempting to trap me there. The idea just didn’t stick, though, and while the storms looked like they would damage Atopia, they were no real threat to me.